I have been reading about American cities being war zones lately. I live by myself in a Mid-Atlantic city, in a mixed neighborhood that is only sort of gentrified, so I guess I’m in one of those war zones. 

I have lived in my current house for nearly twenty years. 

Yeah, I am a little bit afraid at night when I hear a strange noise, and when I open my front door and look out to see what is happening. 

There are a fair number of those strange noises. 

For instance, sometimes I hear a fire engine siren, and see the red flashes out my front window as it pulls into my street and stops half a block down, but it’s not because of fire. It’s because someone nearby called 911 for their recurring health issue. Nothing much happens. Firemen and paramedics stroll back and forth, and they eventually go away after whoever it is gets their oxygen treatment. 

We did have a fire in the next block, once. A neighbor came out and yelled, “Get out of the house!” and everyone did. It was maybe fifteen years ago.

Sometimes I hear police cars, too, but mostly the police are cutting through my street to get somewhere else, because there’s mostly nothing for them to do here. 

It is definitely a busy area, though. There is traffic all night. Cars pull in and out. There are noisy block parties. Some of the young men used to deal drugs, as the young men did in the suburbs where I used to live, but as usually happens, they seem to have become grownups now. 

For a bit, the younger kids I call “the tweens” were playing ding-dong-ditch on my door, until I went out and talked to them. My neighbor across the street had already talked to them, so they heard us finally. 

Recently, I heard a crunch, and looked out. One of the boys had skidded into a moving car on his motorized scooter. It was rainy, the pavement was slick, and he hurt himself. The drivers of the car were scared and worried, but they hung around. His dad came and got him, and later had a talk with the other boys, and they aren’t riding in the street any more, just on the sidewalk. 

Just now, I heard the loud hollow thunder of things being flung about. I went out in my stocking feet. The tweens were horsing around with my next-door neighbor’s trash cans, which had been left out after trash day because my next-door neighbor doesn’t know any better. The tweens stopped and looked at me when I went out, expecting to get yelled at. “You don’t want to break those,” I said. I put one of the cans against the front wall of the house. “Would you get the other one for me?” I said to the big boy who is so grouchy, though to be fair, he does say hello to me. 

“I got you,” he said, and put that one against the wall, too.

“I appreciate you,” I said and went back inside, and they went back to screaming, running, and playing. They are having a wonderful childhood, those kids. 

Sometimes the city has fireworks down at the Art Museum, and I go out on my front step and watch them, because my view is great here. That’s honestly as close as I get to living in a war zone, watching all those things blow up above the trees on a summer night.  

Yeah, there have been shootings in the general area. Yeah, once I yelled at a couple having a fight in the middle of the street (She was threatening him with a knife. They were both laughing. I told them to get back in their car, and they did, and they drove away). There are shootings in the suburbs, too. They tend to go unnoticed until someone calls the police, because nobody hears the shots.

The thing is, when I lived out in the dark and leafy suburbs, in my tiny standalone cottage with its sad damp mossy lawn all around it, with the rhododendrons concealing my front porch and the looming ash trees leaning down all around overshadowing my house, and with the neighbors who didn’t talk to anyone and hid inside their houses, I was afraid then, too. A lot more afraid. If someone had decided to attack me, I was much less safe then than I am now.

Now all I have to do, if something happens, is start yelling, and everyone — and I mean everyone— will be out there wanting to know what’s going on. It is the friendliest damn place in the world when there’s a disaster. Everyone out on the sidewalk, asking, “What’s happening?” 

Usually what’s happening is nothing much, but at least we get a chance to chat.